I agree with the assessment, on the Canadian sister site (Amazon.ca) by Amazon user Adam D. Dunn of this very beautiful, sweetly erotic collection of male nudes. However, I do feel that the collection (in b&w photography) by Howard Roffman, The Boys of Bel Ami, to which Dunn compares the book by Thoma, is at least equally fine (and for me, slightly superior, but, really, that is a matter of taste). Discussing my own summation of the merits of the collections of photography respectively by Benno Thoma and by Howard Roffman, makes (I hope) for useful comments to aid the buyer in choosing between these two most massive (so far) of nude male photography from Bel Ami studios.
Rare are those who look through Around the Globe, the book by Thoma, who will be indifferent to his photos of strikingly attractive young males. One of the nicest assets, among so many fine ones, of the colour photographs by Thoma, is the excellence of rear shots; Thoma knows supremely well how to photograph the buttocks of a young man to maximum allure! Nearly all of the photographs, however, are highly appealing, be they frontal, dorsal, or side shots, in the collections alike of the work of Thoma and Roffman.
The heart of my assessment, quoting myself, of Howard Roffman's The Boys of Bel Ami is this: "The youthful men [whom Roffman photographed], in their teens and early twenties, very often in full frontal nudity, are exquisitely lithe, graceful, lovely, and agreeably or outright impressively well-hung, each memorably good-looking in his own way that varies from one to another, some 'lean and lanky' while others more sleekly and/or heavily muscled in a more forthrightly macho way, still others, by contrast, more endearingly pretty (sweetly juvenile, lovely, and tender), yet others just a bit raffish or lovably gangly rather than so classically handsome". Bel Ami's models working for Roffman, in all their glorious variety, make for an even wider range of the manifestations of male beauty, although there is a pleasing variety of physical types, from one young male to another, in the book by Thoma as well.
"Whether one prefers Roffman's Boys of Bel Ami or Benno Thoma's equally copiously large Around the Globe (which features among Thoma's naked lads some of the same male models in Roffman's book) probably is largely a matter of taste, e.g. a preference for mostly colour photography (Thoma's) or entirely black-and-white camera work (Roffman's), or for the sensibility of one photographer over the other's; both books and the young men posing mostly nude therein, are consummately lovely examples of erotic photography at its best."
Few readers (i.e. viewers!) are likely to find the lads of either book uninteresting, in the way that Mr. Dunn seems to be so indifferent to the choice and photographic depiction of the young guys that Roffman delivered. If the buyer can afford it, he should obtain both books!